Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern Chinese town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children's school tuition.

But the plans of Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwan chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several U.S. shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs.